


Borealis

by thesearchforbluejello



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Angst, Audrey has a bad night, Audrey's UMaine mug is my favorite recurring character, Drabble, F/M, I have a lot of conflicting feelings about season 3, I'm freaking out because this fic has 3207 words and 207 is the ME area code how did this happen, I've been team Nathan since July 9 2010, Set during season 3, if that makes sense, massholes are part of maine culture, mentions of hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 20:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15915438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: Nathan gets a phone call in the middle of the night.





	Borealis

**Author's Note:**

> It's always interested me to think about what happened in-between the episodes of season three. Here's a random drabble that came to mind. (Unbeta'ed)

(He should really know by now to expect calls in the middle of the night.)

He dimly registers surprise in the grogginess of slow awakening, blinking at the too-bright screen in the darkness of his room.

"Hello?" He couldn't even read the screen. (He hasn't had much time or inclination to sleep lately.)

"Nathan."

"Parker?" He sits up, swinging his legs over the side of his bed. Things have been tense between them lately and he's especially surprised to hear her voice, not that emergency midnight phone calls have ever been particularly common, even in Haven.

"Can you come get me?"

"What?" he says, and then blames the exhaustion for his hesitation. He could never, never be angry enough to refuse to help her.

"I'm on Brook Street, near the bridge. I need a ride." She says it like it's normal, like he shouldn't be worried.

"Are you okay?" (He's always worried about her.)

"Yeah, I'm fine."

He wants to interrogate her, to know why she's asking for a ride at one-thirty in the morning if she's "fine," and he tells himself it's the cop in him, not the constant and consuming fear for her safety that's only grown in the past few months.

Instead he says, "I'll be right there."

***

He doesn't expect the blood in the road (but he should have).

Brook Street is on the edge of town, stretching out into the less populated part of Haven that shares a zip code and its Troubles with the rest. The double yellow is so faded and cracked out here that it almost dissolves entirely into the sun-grayed pavement; in the glare of his headlights, it succeeds in vanishing beneath the sheen of fresh blood smeared in a wide swatch across it. He stops in the road, just shy of Audrey's car, fog dancing and swirling in his headlights, fracturing the beams into fine water motes.

Audrey stands from where she was sitting at the side of the road and moves towards him as he drops to his feet from the truck.

He gets a good look at the car before he can see her clearly; the front end is decimated, headlights and windshield shattered, hood crumpled, roof buckled. Totaled, without a doubt.

He crosses in front of his truck and the bright beams of the headlights cut out just for a moment as he passes. The fog seems suddenly thicker just for a second, heavy and cloying-- he can't feel the cool dampness on his skin, but he can see it and smell it and the memory of that sensation doesn't easily leave someone who has lived in Maine for so long. In the brief darkness the pines seem taller, seem darker, black pointed tops poking at the an infinitesimally lighter sky spattered with stars, sprays of needles invisible in the dark scratching at the fog.

The headlights brighten the road again after he's passed and he finally gets a look at Audrey. 

There's a shine on her left cheekbone that even bleached to gray in the glare he can tell is red beneath and he knows it will bruise in blues before greens and yellows. There's a darkness beneath her left eye, too, that he knows will settle into a dark color, maybe black before it's blue. The blood beneath her nose is still shining, red, tracing down to outline the center bow of her top lip. (The colors mean she's alive, beautifully human.)

He reaches out, gripping her arms gently, ducking his own shoulders just slightly to catch her eyes. (He's worried she's concussed.)

"Are you okay?" he asks. Her blue eyes are dark and colorless in the light.

"I'm fine," she says, and then, "I didn't even see it until I hit it."

Nathan doesn't have to ask her to know what it was. Deer break the windshield or get tucked up under the hood if you're going fast enough. Moose, though, moose make you thank every forgotten pagan god that you're still alive.

He studies her eyes for a minute, still concerned. "I'm fine, Nathan, really." When he doesn't move she reaches up and slips her fingers across the back of his hand, prying his palm away from her shoulder and twisting his wrist so that their hands are palm to palm. He doesn't have the strength of will to remind himself that he shouldn't touch her like this, that he knows better because this is a powerful, heady force that he's playing with and it has the ability to bring him to his knees. (He doesn't remind himself that she's keeping her distance from him, even after everything, even as the clock ticks down to the looming erasure of Audrey Parker.)

He squeezes her hand in his and lets them drop to their sides as he pulls her to his chest with his other arm. He can feel the pressure of her arm across his back through his shirt and his jacket, light and muted unlike the way he feels her hand in his, skin to skin, alive and electric like his nerves are live wire.

He doesn't care that he should care because his partner, his best friend, almost died on a back road in the fog.

When he lets her go she keeps ahold of his hand and lets him pull her toward the truck. He reaches in and pulls out his HPD jacket, the one that's almost comically ill-fitting on her, the one that's warm, the one he wrapped her in after she was tied up and tortured in the basement of the inn.

Her fingers slip away from his as she pulls the jacket on and lets it swallow her.

He tugs on the lapels and ducks his shoulders again, drawing her eyes up to his. "I'm going go make sure it's dead," he says (and she nods because that's the sort of mercy of finality she'll never get).

***

Audrey leans against the Bronco and feels the warmth of the engine against her legs. Nathan has disappeared on the other side of her destroyed car, the beam of his flashlight like a beacon for her to follow his movements. She knows what the moose must look like, a shattered, broken mass of an animal, and she hopes the universe was kind enough to let it die quickly. She tries not to think about the blood in the road so she tips her head back and looks up at the sky. 

There's something sinister about the forest at night, dark and impenetrable, and the early fall fog has left her chilled in an entirely different way. Sometimes she wonders why she loves this place so much.

There's a wildness to it, a darkness to the forest even in the daylight, an incongruent brightness to the sea. Even the stars seem different here, and she can see the Milky Way carving a hazy path of densely scattered stars on clear, moonless nights when she's far at the edge of town. It's a wildness she'd never seen before Haven, never felt before Haven, not in any of the places she'd lived.

That Audrey Parker had lived.

The flashlight bobs its beacon across the pavement and Nathan comes into view again. 

"It's dead," he says softly, voice muted in the fog.

Audrey just nods. 

"Come on," he says, opening the door and guiding her towards it with a hand between her shoulders. He shuts it once she's inside and moves around the truck. (The headlights cut out again as he passes, and for two brief moments Nathan is the brightest thing she sees.) The driver's side door opens with that little squeak it gets when the weather changes this time of year, the little squeak that she knows frustrates Nathan like crazy because no amount of WD-40 can fix it.

He turns the heat on to assuage the chill that's crept in. "I called the Smith brothers. They're coming to tow your car. And Rafferty is going to come take a statement."

"Okay."

He reaches behind the seat for a bottle of water and wets a napkin from the glove box. She turns on the map light and takes it when it's offered to clean the blood from her face. The red is bright against the white of the napkin, even yellowed as it is by the light. Nathan watches her for a moment before finally asking her the question she knows is on his mind. "What were you doing out here last night?"

She's sure he knows and that he's only asking her because he's afraid of the answer. "Hannah called me." He nods. She glances at him, at the shadow of dark stubble on his face from not having shaved, his hair too long, green jacket collar dark with damp from the fog, blue eyes concealing worry. She turns the map light off again.

"Bobby's getting worse," he says softly, not a question. (He'd hoped the boy would have more time.)

"Yeah. He's okay, though. He's a brave kid."

They're both silent for a minute and Audrey leans her head against the back of the seat. She'd already worked almost fifteen hours when Hannah had called, and the exhaustion of the day (of the past month, of the time since she found her own handwriting carved into the lid of a coffin that might as well be her own) is catching up to her quickly as the adrenaline of the accident wears off.

***

She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder, her hand on his thigh, his arm around her waist. They could've done this, Nathan knows. They would've been good together.

A little part of him whispers that there's still time, that he can find a way to fight this, to hold on to her, but his father's words have been haunting him for months now, always lingering in the back of his mind. "She's too important." He can't argue with that, but here in the quiet only interrupted by the hum of the Bronco's engine with the occasional grind of a bearing he's been meaning to get replaced, here in the quiet he can hear her every breath, smell her shampoo still lingering in her hair. He wonders exactly how much his father knew that he never told, that he's left Nathan to figure out for himself.

(It's infuriating-- a quiet, seething anger he pretends he can't feel, like everything else, everything but her.)

He tries not to dwell on it much, but it's been grating on him more and more. Nathan knows his father always believed in the reasons for what he did and that he put Haven before everything, even before Nathan, and even before himself. (Nathan pretends now that he might not have to find out exactly what that feels like.) It's hard enough to make excuses for the chief without the added knowledge that he might have known something that could save Audrey, that could save her from ever having to make the impossible choice she's faced with, that could save her from an almost complete erasure of everything that comprises her identity. (That could save him from losing her.)

Lights flood the cab of the truck and Audrey stirs. She pulls away from him, looking out the window as Rafferty parks her SUV beside them. Her hand was a muted pressure through his jeans, her cheek a muted weight against his shoulder, but he feels that loss just as keenly as he always has. It had taken him months to realize that he could feel her touch, months before the chastest of kisses had brought everything he thought he knew about the world tumbling down around him. (He can't bring himself to regret that, even though he thinks he should). It's not cold without her body next to his, it's just empty. (If he thought that bothered him before, it bothers him a whole lot more now.)

She slips down from the truck and Nathan follows suit.

"Detective Parker," Rafferty greets. "Detective Wuornos," she adds when Nathan comes around the front. (The headlights dim again as he moves and he doesn't need to feel the cold to shiver.)

"Officer Rafferty," he says.

She nods before looking at Audrey and saying, "That's, uh, quite a parking job you got there, Detective."

Audrey has never gotten along well with Rafferty, but Nathan can see some of the tension leave her shoulders at the joke. "You know how it is," she says, "once a Masshole always a Masshole." Rafferty snorts. 

Nathan had told Audrey once that she'd have to stay in Maine ten years before she'd lose her Masshole status. It had been funny at the time, and she'd thunked her UMaine mug, the one he'd given her, down on his desk and argued with pseudo- indignance that she'd only been in Boston for a few years and that it was unfair to be lumped in with the Massholes. He'd countered with a reminder of the time Eleanor had taken chalk and drawn Audrey her very own parking spot to adjust for the frankly offensive parking job she'd done in front of Haven Joe's. (It isn't funny now that they know she's been in Haven longer than he's been alive.)

Nathan leaves Audrey with Rafferty as the Smith brothers' flatbed pulls up, the roof lights glaring in the blood not yet dried in the road.

(There are plenty of more meaningless ways to die.)

***

She doesn't expect the silence (but she should have).

Nathan isn't exactly chatty on his most gregarious days, and they often spend rides across town in an easy sort of silence. Tonight, though, Audrey watches the grays and blacks of shadows play across his profile in the dim light of the cab. Signs flash by, flaring bright in yellows and whites as they pass. As the streets become more populated with houses they pass a field where the dim bluegreen reflection of deer's eyes look back at her from vague shapes only distinguishable as a dark, huddled mass, fading into the night at the edges.

She shivers.

Nathan turns the heat back on. (She knows he cares-- too much, she thinks most days now-- but sometimes when she feels alone it's a cruel comfort to have a reminder.)

She wonders what would have happened if she'd died.

It would have been meaningless, lacking any sort of profundity at all, but at least it would have given her closure, finality. She's willing to die to protect Haven (and some nagging feeling has been telling her all along that she's supposed to, that she must, that it's the designated end of a short, misleading, and very confusing journey). That, though, that would have been no help to anyone at all, a notion that conflicts with her most basic understanding of her purpose in Haven.

The motion of the truck has her relaxed, but the potholes left by last winter's frost and the bumps from the granite pushing up beneath the pavement make the truck rock and buck as they drive, keeping her awake. Maine DOT doesn't care about the roads out here, even in a town run rampant with tourists in the summer months. Haven is on its own, in every way imaginable.

It's hard for Audrey not to feel the same and there are many days when she thinks it would be better to be on her own, especially knowing what she knows now. (Sometimes she remembers the chief on the beach, his hurried versions of truths before he died, telling her she always had friends. Sometimes she forgets.)

Gravel crackles under the tires as they pull into the Gull's driveway. The restaurant is dark at this time of night, and so is her apartment. (She lied to Nathan and said she felt fine, felt safe in her apartment after the Bolt Gun Killer took her, after the day she was tied up in a basement and forced to listen to a woman being murdered, after the night Nathan took her to his house and let her sleep in his bed because she was terrified, after the morning she woke screaming and he laid on top of the covers and held her until she calmed, setting aside all of his personal boundaries for her because he knew that she understood that he was safe.)

(She doesn't have that now-- she can't. (They can't.))

The truck stops. Nathan looks at her and she puts a hand on the door handle. "Thank you," she says, and presses her palm to the back of Nathan's hand where it rests on the seat for the briefest moment.

"I'll pick you up in the morning," he says. "At eight," he adds (because she's always a bit of a mess in the mornings, but more so now that she's catching catnaps every few hours rather than anything resembling real sleep). He's got that little half-smile that shows mostly in his eyes, just a slight upturn in the corners of his mouth. (She can't smile back, even though she wants to, because it would be to say everything is okay even though it's not.)

"Goodnight, Nathan." (She doesn't thank him because she knows he won't except her gratitude for a myriad of reasons, most of which are too powerful to be unleashed into the confined space of the Bronco's cab.)

"'Night, Parker." (He's glad she doesn't thank him.)

The gravel crunches beneath her shoes as she closes the door. It shuts loudly in the quiet night and a shiver runs up her spine, creeping onto her neck and pulling at her hair. The headlights cast her shadow in front of her larger than life, a distorted legacy of her brief travel. It's gone when she turns the corner. 

A foghorn sounds in the bay, somewhere by the lighthouse out of sight where the shoreline curves, whose glimmer on the water she can only see on the clearest nights. She leans on the railing for a moment and listens, drawn almost irresistibly to the thought of hearing the sound again, a creeping sort of anticipation, though the sound chills her through Nathan's jacket. The crickets and peep toads are quiet tonight, eerily so, and eventually the foghorn calls again, deep and slow across the bay.

It's like looking out into nothing, a moonless night thick with fog, underscored only by the rush of water against the shore.

Audrey can hear the Bronco's engine and knows Nathan won't leave until she's safely inside.

She unlocks the door and turns on a lamp, locking the door behind her. 

There's a flash against her curtains as the Bronco backs out and Nathan leaves.

She sits on her couch, still in his jacket. (She'll fall asleep like that, warm, holding onto a remembered sense of safety.)

(Nathan will fall asleep when the night is just beginning to fade, red dawning in the eastern sky. As the son of a man who considered sailing his only hobby, he will know what this means.)

(They don't know how bad things are going to get.)

(They'll wake up in the morning to see the fog burning off and they'll feel better, if only a little.)

**Author's Note:**

> I tried something new with this piece-- let me know what you thought! The most fascinating thing about Haven to me is how it gets more and more complicated every time you rewatch it. Just Passing Through has really stuck with me, and I find it interesting to consider everything that's unpacked in that episode in the smaller scale of season three.
> 
> Funny thing that's kind of odd, actually: the afternoon after I wrote the large part of this, a coworker and I coincidentally ended up talking about all the creepy things we've seen out here in the small hours of the morning. I've seen some things I can't easily explain, and I can definitely understand where Stephen King gets his ideas. (Fun fact: I live in the *real* Haven, the one from the Tommyknockers. Yes, I see Stephen King around every summer. No, I've never spoken to him, because he deserves privacy.)
> 
> Also, Maine DOT does not, in fact, give a shit. On the roads that are supposed to be lined, there's barely any paint. The potholes are inches deep, and the roads are buckling in the middle and crumbling at the edges. Welcome to the real Haven.


End file.
